utf8_encode

Encodes an ISO-8859-1 string to UTF-8
(PHP 4, PHP 5)

string utf8_encode ( stringdata )

This function encodes the string data to
UTF-8, and returns the encoded version.
UTF-8 is a standard mechanism used by
Unicode for encoding wide
character values into a byte stream.
UTF-8 is transparent to plain ASCII
characters, is self-synchronized (meaning it is possible for a program to
figure out where in the bytestream characters start) and can be used with
normal string comparison functions for sorting and such. PHP encodes
UTF-8 characters in up to four bytes, like this: